The New Normal in New England

BOSTON — It is a little bit after 10 o’clock on a gorgeous spring night and once again, the Olde Towne is hopping with activity.

At Fenway, the Red Sox are just about to polish off the Blue Jays thanks to a Jon Lester no hitter. At the Garden, the Maple Leafs are about to hang on to a 2-1 win over the Bruins to send the Stanley Cup first round series to a Game 6 in Toronto.

And at every turn from Kenmore Square to Faneuil Hall, the bars are overloaded with young adults celebrating the end of another semester at one of the area’s institutes of higher learning with plenty of alcohol and loud thumping music.

On the surface, it looks like the Boston that I’ve known since coming up here every couple years since I was a kid — about as cool and lively a city as you can.

And then, you reach the intersection of Boylston and Dartmouth and the large crowd at memorial that has been built at the site of the finish line of the Boston Marathon. And you understand that everything in this town has changed since the bombing on Patriots Day.

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Undoubtedly, many Phillies fans will make the trek up to Fenway this week for the quick two game series between the Phils and the Red Sox.

It may not be as many as the past because the series is being played during the week, the Red Sox are in here immediately afterwards on Wednesday and Thursday and, well, the group in red and gray uniforms are not as good as they have been in the past.

But those that do arrive by car, plane or train will find a city that is still trying to deal with the five-day nightmare that hit in mid-April.

Copley Square- the traditional finish line site which is not far from the landmark Prudential Center- has been turned into a shrine with homemade banners, t-shirts, notes and candles. On this particular night, roughly 300 people were in the area at 10:30 p.m. Along with them were street musicians playing slow and sad music — one on a bagpipe, another on a guitar, still another on a portable keyboard.

At the center of the display are four crosses with the names of the four fatalities that took place during the incident — 29 year old Krystal Campbell, 23-year-old Lingzi Lu, nine-year-old Martin Richard and 26-year-old MIT Police officer Sean Collier, who was killed during the manhunt for the two suspects three days later in nearby Cambridge. (Several others remain injured — many of them having lost limbs in the incident.)

It is different than the World Trade Center site for more than just the obvious reasons of numbers. When you went into Lower Manhattan, you heard little conversation and almost this sense of reverence as the makeshift observation deck was put up and crowds paid respects.

At Copley, you hear people talking and expressing their opinions. On the Friday of this visit, one of the alleged bombers — Tamerlan Tsarnaev — was buried at a Virginia cemetery after much controversy. As people walked by, Tsarnaev’s burial was the main subject and a lot of the words being used were not proper for a family newspaper.

But the impact goes well beyond the Copley Square area. Ride the train — known as “The T” — through the city and it doesn’t take long to see the impact. There are more police officers visible throughout town — on transit lines, street corners and anywhere that the public gathers. At Fenway, there was a bomb-sniffing dog checking out backpacks and computer bags — just in case.

There is a sense of resiliency that has been built up around here. The “Boston Strong” shirts- or in the Red Sox case, the Olde English “B Strong” patches — are being sold by every street corner vendor and painted into every bar window. The people act the same way- friendly, but opinionate like always.

Boston and Philadelphia may have their battles and their moments over the years, but the two cities are probably the most similar to one another of any grouping on the East Coast. Both are constructed the same way out of that old Colonial grid. Neither carries that New York feel of enormity or that Washington feeling of self-importance. And both cities are made up of neighborhoods and suburbs that take on a certain character of their own, creating this weave that makes up a unique fabric that you don’t see in many spots.

And the way that Boston handled havoc and tragedy is the way you hope we could have handled it if God forbid it ever happened in our region. You grieve, you cry, you find and then you get back to living your life — even if it is with a more wary eye.

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